FAQ

In Le Million, Rene Clair, one of the cinema's great directors and
great pioneers, created a gem of light comedy which for all its
lightness is a groundbreaking and technically brilliant film which
clearly influenced subsequent film-makers such as the Marx Brothers,
Lubitsch, and Mamoulian. The plot, a witty story of a poor artist who
wins a huge lottery jackpot but has to search frantically all over town
for the missing ticket, is basically just a device to support a series
of wonderfully witty comic scenes enacted in a dream world of the
director's imagination.

One of the most impressive things about this film is that, though it is
set in the middle of Paris and includes nothing actually impossible, it
achieves a sustained and involving fairy-tale/fantasy atmosphere, in
which it seems quite natural that people sing as much as they talk, or
that a tussle over a stolen jacket should take on the form of a
football game. Another memorable element is that Le Million includes
what may be the funniest opera ever put on film (O that blonde-braided
soprano! "I laugh, ha! ha!") Also a delight is the casting: Clair has
assembled a group of amazing, sharply different character actors, each
of them illustrating with deadly satiric accuracy a bourgeois French
"type," so that the film seems like a set of Daumier prints come to
life.

The hilarity takes a little while to get rolling, and I found the
characters not as emotionally engaging as they can be even in a light
comedy (as they are, for instance, in many Lubitsch films.) For these
reasons I refrained from giving it the highest rating. But these minor
cavils shouldn't distract from an enthusiastic recommendation.

Should you see it? By all means. Highly recommended whether you want a
classic and influential work of cinema or just a fun comedy.

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